Mark Steyn, whom we excerpted below, asserts that there’s method to the madness of the Obama administration:

The president’s general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don’t need this in my life right now. He’s a domestic transformationalist, working overtime — via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc. — to advance statism’s death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn’t want anyone nuking America before he’s finished turning it into a socialist basket-case.

This isn’t simply a matter of priorities. A United States government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can’t be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they’re beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to “provoke” America but demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves, and knock-off Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart.

Among the distinguished guests present for North Korea’s October 2006 test were representatives of the Iranian government. President Bush was much mocked for yoking the two nations together in his now all but forgotten “axis of evil” speech, but the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported a few weeks ago that the North Korean–built (and Israeli-bombed) plutonium production facility in Syria was paid for by Tehran.

It is only fair to note that the Bush administration responded weakly to the 2006 North Korea test, but at least Bush wasn’t threatening to add a completely unaffordable $10 trillion in new deficits that will, by their size, diminish the US as world power — and make it captive to its lenders such as China.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 5:36 am and is filed under business, China, Democrats, General, Iran, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.